About Me

Hi, I’m Alex.

I build communities, started one of the longest running coworking communities in the world, write a crapload of words every day, tweet a little too much, coach people to be the best version of themselves possible, can't stop learning new things, and do my very best not to take myself too seriously.

I have one goal: to fill the world with truly excellent collaborators so we can all work together, better.

Because let's be honest...most of us aren't very good at it.

Start here

These are my most popular and most valuable pieces, to help you get started.

so a 10 day hiatus from my practically brand new blog probably isn’t good for publicity…but work comes first, ya know? Things have been totally out of control the last week and a half…and to make things worse, I’m going away for a 5 days weekend starting this thursday. This means I’ve logged almost 30 hours in the last 2 days just to put our project in a spot where the programmers have enough front end to work with. The plight of being the only xhtml/css/javascript dude in the shop.

Anyway…I actually have a lot of things to talk about on here so…hopefully all of my loyal readers from weeks prior are willing to hang tight just a little bit more…by the time I get back from vacation, there will be plenty of new content and thoughts up here for you to chew on. In the mean time, I’ll bullet out some quick thoughts:
– weird print spooler error on my mom’s work computer caused by stopping print spooler service, deleting all files in c:/windows/system32/spooler/printers with .shd and .spl extensions, and then restarting. I REALLY didn’t think this was gonna work.

-I’m a crazy fast layout developer. but for Christ’s sake, i need a better system for keeping track of tasks because i take on eleventy billion tiny tasks, and inevitably, stuff gets forgotten. Thanks to Seth at work for hooking up BugNet for all of our bug tracking needs. Still need a full solution for my own stuff, but this is a good start.

-Philadelphia is freaking hot in the summer. This is my 4th summer here, it gets worse every year. 100+ the last 2 days before the heat index. no A/C in my POS car. YUCK.

-speaking of my POS car, i’m planning on buying something new(ish) by the end of the year. qualifications are a)low payments and b)high gas economy. I’m actually considering a Scion. Any comments/recommendations? Worth noting: my credit is a disaster from my first year and a half of school. Still recovering from that. So any “low interest rate” deals likely wont apply to me 🙁

-has anyone reading this built any flash-driven media-experiences (a-la heavy.com)? Question about ad revenue tracking…if you’ve got experience, leave a comment, I’ll be posting more details about this as I know more information, at least enough to ask an educated question.

…and the little pieces that splatterd on the wall spelled out a “inspiration”.

A story submitted to digg brought me to a page called Imagining the 10th dimension. A guy named Rob Bryanton wrote a book that explains his own theory of reality…which he claims is quite different from other physicists. At any rate, the main function of this website is to step through each dimension, from 0 to 10, and explain how they relate to one another. I have to say, while it started to get very complicated Rob, whom i presume was doing the narration (or at least scripted it) did an incredible job of describing each movement. The most incredible part for me was probably the level of inspiration that came from the description of the 10th dimension, and why we cannot move past it: without giving too much away, the 10th dimension contains ALL possibility. Sounds like a sweet concept for a brand, dontcha think? Maybe its a good thing that I havent had a chance to move forward with the “we know html” brand….we’ll see what i can come up with from there.

Oh, one more thing of note, the experience on this website is one of the most clever and clean flash implimentations i’ve ever seen (thats not to say others ive seen are not clever nor clean, but not many fall into BOTH categories). Some of my favorite features are the “swing in” left nav and the progress indicator which displays which dimension you are learning about.
Please take some time to check the whole thing out, and if you can, hop over to the digg story and give it a digg.